Homepage not ranking for targeted keywords (established site with somewhat ok UR&DR)
-
Hello everyone, i have a question regarding my homepage issue. My homepage is not showing up in google search result for all the keywords except brand name. I have checked the following things to make sure my homepage is working properly.
- 1.The page is indexed.
- 2.No canonical issues
- 3.No robots.txt issues.
- 4.Ahrefs UR45 DR55 while my competitors ranking in 2nd and 3rd page have lower UR and DR
- Have tens of thousands of backlinks but i think most of them are legit
I suspect the problem might be the hoempage has more than 70 Anchor text (Internal links) working as directory, and many of them contain the keywords we are targeting. Will that be the reason my homepage is not ranking at all? Since the google might consider it as keyword stuffing and penalize my homepage for that.
What are your thoughts on this? Any suggestion would be greatly appreciated!
-
Trying to rank a homepage for all your keywords is a fairly difficult task in any industry, and usually service, product, and blog pages are used to target certain keywords so that you aren't putting some much pressure on your homepage to rank. The fact that you have "tens of thousands" of links is a little concerning to me, but if you believe they are all legitimate then more power to you. I would try to increase the content quality and quantity of the homepage and if possible decrease the amount of anchor text links as Google may be seeing this as spammy.
-
Hey there,
some of the natural things to look for are of course content quality and on page optimization for those kwds. Did you check these? If these are good too - then google migt not rank you because of the user experience metrics. If this is the case consider changing the design, menus, links, etc. ux is very important nowadays.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Internal Links & Possible Duplicate Content
Hello, I have a website which from February 6 is keep losing positions. I have not received any manual actions in the Search Console. However I have read the following article a few weeks ago and it look a lot with my case: https://www.seroundtable.com/google-cut-down-on-similar-content-pages-25223.html I noticed that google has remove from indexing 44 out of the 182 pages of my website. The pages that have been removed can be considered as similar like the website that is mentioned in the article above. The problem is that there are about 100 pages that are similar to these. It is about pages that describe the cabins of various cruise ships, that contain one picture and one sentence of max 10 words. So, in terms of humans this is not duplicate content but what about the engine, having in mind that sometimes that little sentence can be the same? And let’s say that I remove all these pages and present the cabin details in one page, instead of 15 for example, dynamically and that reduces that size of the website from 180 pages to 50 or so, how will this affect the SEO concerning the internal links issue? Thank you for your help.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Tz_Seo0 -
Opinion on Gotch SEO methods & services
I would love to get you all's take on Gotch SEO. I am gearing up to link build for a site in the next several months, and have been reading up from sources other than Moz, in preparation. (Need to re-read Moz's guide, too, but I have already read it last year) I'm reading Gotch SEO's main link building method articles right now, and am wondering what you all think. Do you think they have a good approach and are generally reliable? Likewise, has anyone used their service for getting a link? What was your experience? Or if you haven't used the service, any quick takes on it?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | scienceisrad0 -
Duplication Effects on Page Rank and Domain Authority
Hi Does page rank and domain authority page rank drop due to duplication issues on a web domain or on a web page? Thanks.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | SEOguy10 -
How to fix doorway site
Hello, This client has a one page doorway site that is a copy of a category of his main site. It looks like the main site and has over 100 links to the site. We're cleaning things up to be white hat and we're wondering how to capture this traffic and link juice (this doorway has no backlinks though, it is an EMD) without a ton of money and effort. My thought so far is to put a uniquely designed paypal cart on there with top products and one link to the main site that says something like: To pay by credit card or to see more products, visit mainsite.com Would that be squeeky clean white hat or is that still a doorway headed for an update? What's best to do here on a low budget?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobGW0 -
Site being targeted by hardcore porn links
We noticed recently a huge amount of referral traffic coming to a client's site from various hard cord porn sites. One of the sites has become the 4th largest referrer and there are maybe 20 other sites sending traffic. I did a Whois look up on some of the sites and they're all registered to various people & companies, most of them are pretty shady looking. I don't know if the sites have been hacked or are deliberately sending traffic to my client's site, but it's obviously a concern. The client's site was compromised a few months ago and had a bunch of spam links inserted into the homepage code. Has anyone else seen this before? Any ideas why someone would do this, what the risks are and how we fix it? All help & suggestions greatly appreciated, many thanks in advance. MB.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | MattBarker0 -
How to know if a link in a directory will be good for my site?
Hi! Some time ago, a friend of my added our site to a directory. I did not notice it until today, when in the search results for my domain name, the directory came in the first page, in the four position. My friend wrote a nice article, describing our bussiness, and the page has a doFollow link. Looking at the metrics of that directory, I found the following: Domain Authority: 70; main page authority: 76; linking domain roots: 1383; total links: 94663 (several anchor texts); facebook shares: 26; facebook likes: 14; tweets: 20; Google +1: 15. The directory accept a free article about a company, does not review it before it is published, but look for duplicated articles representing spam; so one company can only have one listing (in theory). Is there any formula to know if a directory is safe to publish a doFollow link? If they don't review the link I would say is not a good signal, but is there any other factors to take into account?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | te_c0 -
Page Rank is 0
Hi. Can you please point me in the right direction concerning a site whose default page has a PR of 0? There does not appear to be any errors in the robots.txt file (that I can tell). When I ran a duplicate content check by searching the title tag and first sentance in quotes it did not return more than 2 sites. When I ran a site: it is reporting 287,000 results. Does this mean that they purchased links and have now been penalized? Or where should I go from here? Thank you for any feedback and assistance.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | JulB0 -
How does Google rank a websites search queries
Hello, I can't seem to find an answer anywhere. I was wondering how a websites search query keyword string url can rank above other page results that have stronger backlinks. The domain is usually strong, but that url with the .php?search=keyword just seems like it doesn't fit in. How does Google index those search string pages? Is it based off of traffic alone to that url? Because those urls typically don't have backlinks, right? Has anyone tried to rank their websites search query urls ever? I'm just a little curious about it. Thanks everyone. Jesse
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | getrightmusic0